Architectural Drawings E-Book

Frances, Dr. Sands

• Herausgeber: Batsford
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Seitenzahl: 149

Beschreibung

A visual, large-format compilation of some the finest Architectural Drawings from Sir John Soane's extensive collection.Architectural Drawings casts light on the magnificent Architectural Drawings of neo-classical architect, teacher and collector, Sir John Soane that are otherwise concealed in archives. This book, featuring artworks handpicked from what was probably the first comprehensive collection of Architectural Drawings in the world, numbering 30,000 at the time of his death in 1837, celebrates a life spent procuring curiosities. The collection encompasses the hands of Montano, Thorpe, Wren, Talman, Hawksmoor, Vanbrugh, Gibbs, Kent, Chambers, Adam, Clérisseau, Pêcheux, Wyatt, Playfair, Nash and, of course, Soane himself. The quality of Soane's collection of drawings is scarcely paralleled elsewhere and on account of their fragility, these items are infrequently seen by the public. This innovative book draws together the most exquisite and important works from the collection for the first time, showing the extraordinary connoisseurship of Sir John Soane while also exploring what drove Soane to amass such a collection and the provenance of his various significant acquisitions.This book illustrates the story of Soane as a collector of Architectural Drawings, but a story which is not normally available to the public, and will provide a sumptuous opportunity to peruse some of the finest Architectural Drawings in existence.

Leseprobe

ARCHITECTURALDRAWINGS

Hidden Masterpieces fromSir John Soane’s Museum

After Federico Zuccaro, study of wall decoration, a pope receiving homage in Rome, from the Margaret Chinnery Album, sixteenth century, SM volume 114/9. Photograph: Ardon Bar-Hama.

ARCHITECTURALDRAWINGS

Hidden Masterpieces fromSir John Soane’s Museum

Frances Sands

Contents

Foreword

Introduction

Soane office drawings

Drawings collecting and provenance

Drawings from the collection of Sir John Soane

The Adam drawings collection

John Soane and the Soane office drawings

Soane on the Grand Tour

Soane office drawings

RA lecture drawings

Sir John Soane’s Museum

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

Office of Sir John Soane, RA lecture drawing, the Ionic orders set in a landscape, as designed by the Ten Masters in Fréart’s Parallèle, 1806–19, SM 23/5/2. Photograph: Ardon Bar-Hama.

Foreword

In the very first of his Royal Academy Lectures as Professor of Architecture, John Soane stressed the importance of drawing as an essential attribute for the young architect, together with a mastery of mathematics, geometry and hydraulics. Indeed, Soane’s own instruction under Thomas Sandby and George Dance reinforced the centrality of drawing as a means of expressing new ideas and mastering the intricacies of the great architectural traditions of the past, and such ideas formed the basis of his collections, both of architectural drawings and of plaster casts replicating the elements of architecture to scale.

As Soane’s collecting habits grew and matured, his interests broadened to include a conspectus of building styles, and the 30,000 architectural drawings in the possession of his museum constitute the greater part of his legacy to the nation. Scholars and students still come to Lincoln’s Inn Fields to learn and be inspired by his collection, and it is our hope that this book will give a flavour of that legacy to those unable to visit Sir John Soane’s Museum. I am grateful to Dr Frances Sands, Curator of Drawings and Books, and to all my curatorial colleagues for their efforts in the production of such a handsome and scholarly book, one in which John Soane himself would have taken great pleasure and pride.

Bruce Boucher, Deborah Loeb Brice Director

Sir John Soane’s Museum

December 2019

Office of Sir John Soane, RA lecture drawing, Sir William Chambers’s House of Confucius at Kew Gardens, Richmond, 1806–19, SM 17/5/9. Photograph: Geremy Butler.

Introduction

A visit to Sir John Soane’s Museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields is surely one of the great cultural and aesthetic pleasures in life, and certainly an essential item on any London tourist’s itinerary. The creation of Sir John Soane (1753–1837), one of Britain’s finest architects, collectors and teachers, in this museum we find the extraordinary survival of a private Georgian house-museum-turned-national-collection.

Born in 1753 in Goring-on-Thames in Oxfordshire, John Soan (later Soane) was the son of a bricklayer. The loss of his father in 1767, when Soane was only 14 years old, prompted his removal from Baker’s School in Reading, upon which he followed in his father and older brother’s footsteps and began a career as a bricklayer. Most fortunately for the young Soane, while working as a bricklayer in 1768, an architect’s assistant and family acquaintance, James Peacock, noticed Soane’s talents as a draughtsman and arranged for him to enter into an architectural apprenticeship in the office of the much-admired George Dance the Younger (1741–1825). Three years later, aged 18, Soane was accepted as a student of architecture at the RA, affording him access to their library, lecture series and, most importantly of all, entitling him to submit one of his own drawings to the architecture category of the RA annual competition. In 1776, when Soane was only 23 years old, he won the RA gold medal for architecture with a design for a monumental bridge to cross the River Thames. His success at the RA enabled Soane – through the good offices of Sir William Chambers (1722–96) – to meet King George III and resulted in his nomination for a travelling studentship. This was a scholarship for three years, funded by a royal pension and worth £60 per annum plus expenses of £30 each way; the idea being that the recipient should use the money to undertake a Grand Tour of Europe for the benefit of their education. In 1778 Soane travelled via France to Italy where he busied himself in acquiring a thorough knowledge of the classical tradition of architecture, making drawings of the antique ruins that he encountered and forging contacts with other British grand tourists who would later become his patrons. The importance of Soane’s Grand Tour to his development as an architect was never lost on him, and he noted the date of 18 March in his diary – the day he had ventured forth in 1778 – almost every year for the rest of his life.

Unfortunately, many of Soane’s Grand Tour drawings were lost along with other possessions when the bottom of his trunk fell out as he crossed the Alps on his way home. Among his few surviving souvenirs were a handful of drawings by Italian draughtsmen and four engravings from Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s Vedute di Roma (1748–78), which had been given to him by that great man himself. When Soane returned to London from his Grand Tour in 1780, he set about establishing his own architectural practice and quickly achieved a handful of commissions thanks partly to the many connections he had made abroad and partly to his innovative pared-down Neo-classical style. His first major success came in 1788 when he was appointed Architect to the Bank of England in the face of considerable competition.

In 1790, Soane’s wife Eliza received a major inheritance from her uncle, George Wyatt, a London property developer, enabling the couple to purchase and rebuild the first of three houses on the north side of Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Numbers 12, 13 and 14 now make up Sir John Soane’s Museum. The houses were acquired sequentially in 1792, 1807 and 1823, as Soane required additional space for his growing collection of artworks, antiquities, furniture, books and drawings, which had largely been purchased in the London sale rooms. Soane first resided at number 12 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and later at number 13 where he developed his museum in place of former stables across the back of the houses. It was this building and the collection it contains that Soane left to the British nation with a private Act of Parliament, passed in 1833, and requiring that the museum be kept as far as possible as it was at the time of Soane’s death. He died four years later in 1837 when he was just shy of 84 years old.

It is both wonderful and rather sad that Soane left his house-museum to the British nation. He and Eliza had two sons who survived past infancy, John junior and George, whom Soane had hoped would follow him into the architectural profession and create a Soane-family dynasty much like the Dances or the Adams, but this was not to be the case. The older boy, John junior, died from tuberculosis aged only 37 in 1823, and his younger brother, George, was hot tempered and fiscally profligate. After Soane had refused to bail George out of debtors’ prison in 1815, George sought revenge on his father and wrote two articles in The Champion newspaper in which he was heavily critical of his father’s work:

In the Bank of England, the greater part of which is built by Mr SOANE, we meet with the remnants of mausoleums, caryatids, pillars from temples, ornaments from the Pantheon, and all heaped together with a perversion of taste that is truly admirable. He steals a bit here, and a bit there, and in piling up these collected thefts, he imagines he has done his duty and earned the honours of an artist. Depraved as is the present taste, such follies will not pass for wisdom; the public laugh at these extravagances, which are too dull for madness, and too mad for the soberness of reason.

On discovering that the author of such poisonous words was his own son, the enraged Soane felt utterly betrayed by George, but worse still was Eliza’s reaction. Already suffering with gallstones, Eliza described George’s words as having delivered her ‘death blow’ and she died six weeks later on 22 November 1815. With Eliza’s death, Soane lost his closest friend and confidante. He felt that it had been precipitated by George’s insults, and so framed the two articles adorned with a plaque reading ‘Death Blows’, and George was disinherited. While this story of betrayal and loss is dramatic, the most important things to remember about Soane are his professional and pedagogical successes. He left his museum as an ‘Academy of Architecture’ for the benefit of both students and scholars of architecture, painting and sculpture as well as the public, and his drawings collection constitutes a crucial element of that purpose.

Office of George Dance the Younger, elevation of the entrance front of Coleorton Hall, Leicestershire, 1802–08, SM D1/10/6. Photograph: Geremy Butler.

At one time, Soane had considered specifically creating a Gallery for Drawings and Prints, but instead he built a space in which varied media of art could be displayed together, with framed drawings included within the domestic and Picture Room spaces. Former Soane Museum Curator Peter Thornton has suggested that Soane was rejecting a more formal, typological and academic arrangement ‘in favour of one that he hoped would stimulate the beholder’s imagination by subtle suggestion brought about by placing often highly disparate objects in close proximity to each other’. For some modern visitors the horror vacui of the Soane Museum’s collections of rich and varied artworks can appear as an almost overwhelming maelstrom of objects. Certainly, Soane’s arrangements resist an obvious narrative, but many visitors are able to discern an iconographic programme, albeit one that is no less pleasingly intense in the density of its collected whole. Happily, few visitors of the last two centuries have failed to appreciate the beauty and genius of the place. Paintings, sculpture, furniture, books and other objects are arranged together within Soane’s home at Lincoln’s Inn Fields. The house functioned both as Soane’s laboratory of architectural and interior decorative experimentation, but also as a bespoke container for his collections – a gesamtkunstwerk – in which the architecture and collection are carefully arranged in harmony with one another as a complete work of art. Soane himself spoke of ‘the union and close connexion between Painting, Sculpture and Architecture’ in the 1835 Description of the House and Museum. This allows the viewer’s gaze to rove from one extraordinary item to another, and while being extremely therapeutic to the historically and culturally inclined, this is not a place for visual repose!

Charles James Richardson for Sir John Soane, the Cawdor Vase and Picture Room chimneypiece at 14 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London, 28 September 1825, SM volume 82/16. Photograph: Ardon Bar-Hama.

Among this great and wonderful mêlée of objects one can discern a relatively small number of exquisite framed drawings, grouped within spaces including the Picture Room and the Breakfast Room, alongside many other two- and three-dimensional pieces. Some of these are the work of great and famous hands such as those of Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–78), but the majority show Soane’s own architectural output, often in the form of drawings by the extraordinarily talented artist and draughtsman Joseph Michael Gandy (1771–1843). However, these framed drawings within the public rooms at the museum are merely the tip of the iceberg, with the vast majority of Soane’s drawings collection remaining hidden from sight. Their presence is sometimes hinted at and if one takes a moment to look down at what another object of interest might be resting upon, it is often a cupboard, press or chest filled with drawings. At the end of Soane’s life the entire drawings collection was housed within the museum itself, whereas today many sheets are contained in purpose-designed presses created in the 1920s for the non-public areas of the building. As such, the collection is now dispersed across the entire building, in spaces both public and private, and the running of the museum’s Research Library is regularly as much a treasure hunt as it is an intellectual feast.

But how do we define a drawing as opposed to any other two-dimensional work of art? The word ‘drawing’ is applied to an enormous variety of different media and art forms spanning an array of techniques, for example, a charcoal sketch portrait versus a watercolour architectural view. Moreover, how has the concept of a ‘drawing’ evolved? In fourteenth- to sixteenth-century Italy, during the Renaissance, the word disegno described drawing or designing in monochromatic two dimensions. This did not encompass the use of colour, but crucially, it demanded both a skill in draughtsmanship as well as the intellectual capacity for invention and creative design. This raised the artist above the realm of other mere mortals, aligning him or her with God the Creator, and thus the two-dimensional arts were placed, hierarchically, above other crafts.

In the early modern era, the higher notion of invention associated with disegno was, to some degree, lost. Drawing was no longer necessarily linked with the creative design process as it became commonplace to copy for pleasure or professional purposes – think of the work of a paid draughtsman. As such, ‘drawing’ as an art form came to be associated with any artistic output in which drawing instruments such as pencils, pens and brushes were used to make marks on paper or other two-dimensional media like vellum. It is the significance of the drawn line onto which wash or other media can be applied that distinguishes a drawing from a painting. A watercolour drawing will overlay a line drawing, usually in pencil, but when an artist applies watercolour directly to the paper without the guide of any lines, in a more fluid manner, this is generally considered to be a painting. Naturally there are exceptions to this, for example, the use of dots, either drawn on or pricked from one sheet to another, can serve a similar purpose to the drawn line.

By far the largest proportion of Soane’s drawings collection consists of architectural drawings as opposed to any other genre, such as drawn portraits or landscapes. There are large groups of architectural drawings by well-known figures such as Nicholas Hawksmoor (c.1662–1736) and Sir William Chambers, as well – of course – as a great many drawings from Soane’s own architectural office. Soane’s acquisition of drawings was piecemeal and skilfully opportunistic, like much of his collecting activity. However, this did not constitute a collation of the debris from the contemporary London art market, but rather a series of carefully considered investments in the cream of the crop. The result is a drawings collection that is well balanced across a variety of periods, geographies and subject matters. The only exception to this balance within the collection is the vast office drawings collection of Robert and James Adam, which numbers 9,000 sheets and outnumbers even Soane’s own office drawings. However, it was with due thought that Soane brought the Adam drawings into his museum, having first declined their purchase and then negotiated an excellent price at which the graphic output of such an influential past architect must have been irresistible.

Together the amassed collection of drawings at the Soane Museum comprises one of the most significant in Britain. Most remain in exquisite condition as for almost two centuries they have lain largely undisturbed. It is only in recent decades – since 1995 with the creation of the museum’s first exhibition gallery – that temporary exhibitions have allowed the display of drawings to the public under carefully controlled conditions, albeit in very limited numbers.

Thanks to generous funding from the Leon Levy Foundation, since 2010 the Soane Museum has been able to create a comprehensive archive of digital photography that represents the entire drawings collection. This both facilitates scholarly cataloguing and interpretation of the drawings, allowing us all to better understand the content of this significant national asset, and it has also enabled online publication of the entire drawings collection for public benefit, giving unprecedented, free access to these fragile works without any danger of damage. But even despite all this, the wider public might not feel inclined to peruse an online catalogue without specific cause, and the drawings collection remains a largely hidden and perhaps lesser known facet of the wider collection.

It is my great privilege to work on and with Soane’s drawings collection every day and I am keen to share its riches with a wider audience. While it is not possible to illustrate even 1 per cent of Soane’s drawings collection in this publication, I hope that it will nonetheless offer the reader a glimpse of the most exceptional among the hidden masterpieces that are to be found within the drawings collection at the Soane Museum.

Joseph Michael Gandy for Sir John Soane, Various designs for Public and Private buildings 1780–1815, being an architectural composition of framed perspectives and models of designs by Sir John Soane, exhibited RA 1818, SM P87. Photograph: A.C. Cooper.

Soane office drawings

The drawings from Soane’s own architectural practice are almost as varied as the wider collection itself. Not only was he a prolific architect of pre-eminent skill, necessitating the production of seemingly endless designs for his many commissions, but he was also a teacher and prominent member of the RA, elected ARA in 1795 and RA in 1802. Soane exhibited at the RA with impressive regularity, usually with drawings of his architectural designs in the hand of Joseph Michael Gandy.